d12 system: yay or nay?

[Living Legend]

Ran across and old thread from another site the other day where a guy was gearing up to make a system based around the d12 as the only dice. He was in love with that particular dice and several people in the thread seemed to be as well, so much so that there was a lot of interest in the game.

Not sure if the game got made or not, but the whole thing struck me as curious. I have always liked the d12, and felt it was underused, but I know other gamers that dislike it because of it's propensity to roll a lot.

I'm sure there are some games out there based on d12's and I just never had heard of them. Has anyone played one of these games? If so I'd like to know how they went.

Is there that much love out there for the d12, or did I just read posts by a few oddballs?

 

[Dice4Hire]

The Samurai Swords (Shogun) boardgame uses d12s.

I have laways thought that D&D would be better off without the d20 as it is too wide a range. Maybe d12 would help a bit.

 

[Summer-Knight925]

it is the greatest die every created...but I think it should onlybe used more, not be the only one used

 

[GreyLord]

Advanced Heroquest was based on D12's.

Rangers of Taradoin was also, but you could substitute a pair of dice.

Both weren't pure RPG's as AH was a boardgame, but you could do an entire RPG type thing with it (and without a DM either)...

RoT was more a gamebook and the actual RPG rules were so spread out it was hard to actually do anything with. Plus there were multiple gramatical errors and other snafus that got through editing.

I don't think I'd suggest either to look at before designing an RPG.

I've also played much of both...don't follow my example.

 

[Wik]

I wrote an old RPG using only d12s. It's floating around the internet, somewhere. Can't remember where.

If memory serves, it went something like this:

you had multiple attributes, which ranged from -5d12 (really bad) to +5d12 (really good). Conditions could also grant you more dice, or take away dice you had, but you always rolled two d12s. So the scale went -5D, -4D, -3D, +2D, +3D, +4D, +5D. you never rolled more than 5 dice, with "extra" rolls either adding or subtracting 6 to the final roll.

Skills were flat bonuses, usually ranging from +1 to +6 or so. DCs were around 10 for average difficulty, if memory serves.

Anyways, you would roll your dice, and keep the best two results if it was a positive number of dice you were rolling, or the two worst results if you were rolling a negative number.

If the two dice you kept were doubles of 10, 11, or 12, it was a critical success (with 10s being less critical than 11s, etc). Likewise, double 1s, 2s, or 3s were critical failures. Other double results meant that the success or failure was somehow interesting, and encouraged the player or GM to ad-lib the event.

if you had a positive number of d12s to roll, you could choose to throw some dice into a communal pool instead of rolling them, and other players could draw upon those dice in later rolls (but only if you passed your initial skill check). You could also choose to take multiple actions in a turn, but would lose one d12 for each additional action (much like in the Star Wars RPG).

it played relatively quickly, but had a lethal damage system and didn't allow for much PC progression the way I had written it.

 

[Jhaelen]

I have laways thought that D&D would be better off without the d20 as it is too wide a range. Maybe d12 would help a bit.

It might. In Earthdawn 3e the d20 has been eliminated in favor of the d12. However it's mostly because the system also uses d4, d6, d8, and d10 dice. There's just a too large gap between d12 and d20.

At the very least d12 should replace d4 and d6. The d20 is still useful to approximate percentile dice (and infinitely preferable to the abomination that is the d10 ).

 

[delericho]

I have no particularly strong opinion of the d12 one way or the other. I would play a game that used d12s exclusively if the system was otherwise good, but wouldn't exactly consider it a selling point.

IIRC, when designing 3e, the designers realised quite late that they'd almost written the d12 out of the game entirely! That's why the greataxe does d12 damage.

For my homebrew, I'm trying to set things up so that players only use the platonic solids: d4, d6, d8, d12 and d20, while the DM only uses the d6, d20 and d%.

 

[His Dudeness]

Dominion Rules - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I like it quite a bit.

 

[Technomancer]

Rogue Games uses the 12 Degree system for all its games, which uses only d12s.

They have:

"Shadow, Sword, and Spell", a sword and sorcery game;
"Thousand Suns", a sci-fi game;
"Colonial Gothic", a a supernatural historical horror roleplaying game set during the dawn of the American Revolution

 

[Trance-Zg]

We use d12 in our d20 system to roll for initiative.

It gives more consistency to initiative bonus and gives d12 far more usage.